Page 39 of After Hours
“Everything,” he replied, stern and sure.
So she didn’t worry about what he might think, what it all said about her, or any of the things that normally kept her tongue inside her own mouth and her thoughts to herself.
Romily did what he wanted her to do.
Which was to give him exactly what he’d asked for.
“I was a hostess in a restaurant in San Francisco,” she told him, clearing her throat as she paged back through the set of memories she preferred not to air out unless she was in a therapy session.
But she either trusted him or she didn’t. At the end of the day it was simple, wasn’t it?
Most complicated things were, in the end. She pushed on. “It was a pretty good job. I liked it. He was a customer and after he ate dinner that night, he waited for me to get off work asked for my number.” She sighed a little as she said that. “That could have been creepy. I’ve looked back on that a lot, wondering what red flags I missed, but there weren’t any. Not in the moment we met, or not any that I could have picked up. He wasn’t rude. He was self-deprecating and charming and funny. And so disarming. I gave him my number when he asked and he walked off, instead of getting handsy or strange or any of the other things that I thought were going to happen.”
“Did that happen a lot?” Zachary asked.
“Enough.” Romily shrugged a little, but that made the nipple clamps sharp all over agaon and she pulled in a sharp breath. “He called about five minutes later, while I was walking home. We talked and talked.”
She shifted a little, not because she was uncomfortable—though her breasts were on fire—but because she wanted to hear the soft clank of the chains so she could remember where she was. Not on that street in Cows Hollow. Not grinning and giddy as she walked down dark sidewalks, heedless of the danger.
Both on the streets of the city and on the other end of the phone line.
“Looking back now, all I can see are the red flags, but I didn’t see them then.” She sighed and tested her arms against the tension of her chains. “Everything was perfect. He was perfect. It was as if I’d conjured him up out of my own head, like every fairytale I never believed in as a child.”
She would have done anything in that moment tear her blindfold off and study his face, so she could see the look in his eyes. To see if she could discern any pity. Any judgment. Or anyof the other uncomplimentary things he could be thinking or feeling—because he had to be thinking them. Romily was sure of it.
Because she had been so unforgivablystupid.
But she had no way to get the blindfold off. Maybe that was better.
“I grew up kind of rough,” she told him. Not an excuse, but maybe an explanation. “My parents died when I was little and the good part about that is that I don’t remember them. I think I grieved them less than some would. I can only grieve the idea of who they might have been for me, which is really just another fairy tale.”
“And the bad part?” Zachary asked quietly.
“The bad part is that I was passed around from one family member to another until I was eighteen. Never really wanted. Forever a burden. It was always really clear to me that the best course of action was to stay quiet and not to all attention to myself. To hope that no one noticed me. Because when they did, that was usually when I had to bounce around until I could impose on another family member’s charity.”
She blew out a breath, hating the memories of those years. Always shrinking herself down and trying to stay small and inobtrusive. Always having to stay sweet and obliging or she’d be accused of ingratitude. Usually being told she ungrateful anyway.
“I was happy to get away from that,” she said now. “I left all of them as soon as I could and I never went back. I waited tables until I had enough money to move to San Francisco, because if I never see Modesto again it will be way too soon. I was twenty when I met Joseph. Or when he found me, I guess you could say.”
Romily shuddered then—and not the way she did anytime Zachary looked at her.
She felt his hand moving over her jaw. Her cheek. She pressed her face into his palm, because that was what centered her. Him.
He kept her safe. Even while she talked him through a nightmare.
“It took him six weeks,” she told him, her voice low. “Six weeks of being the answer to every prayer I’d never dared say out loud, because who was listening? It was a dream come true in every possible way. I couldn’twaitto marry him. The life we had planned was better than anything I could ever have imagined.”
It was funny, though. She couldn’t really remember what that planned fantasy life was now. Too much had happened, and then she’d left the reality of that life. Now there was Zachary. So when she looked back, all she could really access was that she’d been so sure that she and Joseph would behappy.
That everything would feel like those six weeks had. A mad rush of giddy perfection.
And today when she looked back, she discovered that she no longer hated that twenty year old girl she’d been. She no longer despaired of her, thinking she was such an idiot and so blind. It wasn’t a character flaw to trust a person who claimed they loved her.
It was on him that he never had. That it had all been a sick game.
Today, Romily just felt sorry for the version of her who had believed in someone for the first time in her life.
“We got married one day at the courthouse, just us, because that was so special. He told me he’d planned our honeymoon and it was supposed to be beyond romantic. I was so excited.” Romily had to clear her throat again. “But the moment we got married, things got weird. He drove us down the coast to Monterey, to a hotel he’d picked out and had been telling me about for weeks, but we didn’t talk much on the drive. That wasstrange. Different. I was a little overwhelmed and still pretty giddy myself, so I thought he was too. But I was wrong.”
